Zoomable timeline of the cosmos puts us in our place

(Image: The Outercurve Foundation, Microsoft Research, University of California, Berkeley, and Moscow State University)

It certainly makes you feel small. A new interactive website takes you on a crash course through the history of our universe, all the way from the present day right back to 13.7 billion years ago and the dawn of time.

ChronoZoom, which went live yesterday, is a timeline that is subdivided into millions of years, which lets users zoom in on the most interesting eras - whether it's the birth of the first stars or when humans first walked the Earth.

Manipulating the slider, zooming in from the big bang through to the Mesozoic era for example, you get an intuitive sense of how our own existence on Earth occupies such a tiny portion of the scale. Each segment of time is packed with extras, like video clips or personal stories, or extra data about the period. Zoom in close to the very beginning of time and a separate chart appears that illustrates what happened in the first seconds after the big bang.

Submenus let users switch the focus from the cosmos section of the timeline all the way down to human prehistory and beyond.

ChronoZoom is a joint project between Microsoft Research, the University of California, Berkeley, and Moscow State University in Russia. It was conceived in a class about "Big History" at the University of California being taught by Walter Alvarez - the geologist who proposed the idea that the dinosaurs were wiped out by the impact of an asteroid hitting Earth. He says the idea is for ChronoZoom to help give some idea of the sheer scale of time.

Roland Saekow came up with the initial zoomable timeline concept during Alvarez's class in 2009 and has worked on ChronoZoom ever since. He says his idea "might one day help visualise all the information in Wikipedia or all the world's libraries".